In this episode, Phil and JF are joined by Meredith Michael—musicologist, podcaster, and Weird Studies production assistant—for a conversation about animal songs. The phrase is intentionally slippery. Are we talking about songs about animals, or songs by animals? Both, as it turns out. Beginning with three very different human compositions—The Beatles’ “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey,” Hovhaness’s And God Created the Great Whales, and Björk’s “Human Behavior”—the hosts discuss the roles animals play in human music, mythology, and mind. Along the way, they touch on Pink Floyd, the Beatles' trip to India, heroin addiction, the indeterminacy of singing and screaming, the messiness of inter-species communication, the discovery of whale song, the problem of (not) projecting humanness onto animals, the Book of Genesis, and the porous boundary between the human and non-human worlds. All that (and more) for two of the songs! Phil’s pick will be explored in a forthcoming episode.
Meredith Michael is a PhD candidate in Musicology at the Indiana
University Jacobs School of Music. She is working on a dissertation
about musical mythologies of outer space in the twentieth century. In
her spare time she loves making art of all kinds, going for long walks,
making friends with cats, and watching cartoons. Meredith hosts the Cosmophonia podcast with Gabriel Lubell.
References
Victor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique”
Pink Floyd, Animals
Neko Case, "People Got a Lotta Nerve"
The Beatles, "Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except for Me and my Monkey"
Gavin Steingo, Interspecies Communication: Sound and Music beyond Humanity
Little Richard, "Long Tall Sally"
Alan Hovhaness, And God Created Great Whales
Roger Payne, Songs of the Humpback Whale
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
Olivier Messiaen, Quartet for the End of Time
Weird Studies, Episode 181 on “The X Files”
Kate Altizer, Piano Dogs and Whale Theaters: Paranoid Relations and Affect with Nowhere to Go in the Study of Nonhuman Animals and Music
David Rothenberg, Thousand Mile Songs
Frans de Waal, Mama’s Last Hug
King James Bible
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
Leonard Nimoy (dir.), Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
RILM Abstracts of Music Literature
George Crumb, Vox Balaenae
Terrence Malick (dir.), The Tree of Life
Image by Navin75, via Wikimedia Commons
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